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[Dellnak]

Mephansteras:
Thank you, this clarified a lot.

I recognize it is stupid to say this when I have no source to provide, but I remember reading a claim that the technological advancements of humanity have been this fast after the invention of agriculture, because food output per person increased and thus a population could support more people not dedicating their life to feeding others, and that these people, with time to actually think and try stuff made much of the new technology possible.

I think this is plausible for two reasons. First is that time to think makes innovations possible, but I think I have said enough about that in my previous posts. Second is that for a new technology to spread outside a very small community (one house, or maybe a town) needs active work. A miner who discovered a new way of mining couldn't blog about it or even present a poster in mining conference. It is of course possible that he presented to his foreman a way of being more effective, who briefed his own superior and so on, until the king ordered everyone in his kingdom to use the new technique. I don't know how interested the superiors generally were about the opinions or ideas of their inferiors and there wasn't that nice a organization. So in the worst case even if some peasant invented something new, the information didn't spread widely. Maybe he taught his sons, but even then the rate of spreading would have been much too slow.

I find it much more easy to believe that widespread new techniques and technologies came from people somehow already high enough in the chain. I have no trouble believing that if a miner or a blacksmith is specifically tasked with finding a way of making a better pick, he is more likely to do so than if he was only doing what he had always been doing. This is a well-known problem of exploration and exploitation, which in short means that once you find a good local maximum at doing something, you are not very willing to explore other possibilities because it will probably lead to decrease in performance. Unless you have large reserves of food or your payment is not dependent on the short-term performance, this is bad. And even if probability of the invention itself wasn't any higher, the probability of the invention getting attention surely was.

Now, I am no kind of expert of history, especially of medieval history, and I don't know if anything like this ever happened and frankly, I don't think it is the most important thing. I have not yet came across anything that pointed out that the scenario described above _could_ not have occurred, even if it didn't. Of course, too many of these dedicated researchers would probably had lead to mass starvation and it is a responsibility of the ruler to decide if having them is worth the reduced amount of food produced. Another related factor I think was important in our history was the tendency of human nature to value short-term rewards over long-term. These both are factors that I think would make the game more strategic and interesting. Your legendary dwarves have the best possibility of getting results, but that means they are not doing what they do the best, so are you sure you want to do this? The research should be relatively costly, both in labor and in materials.  It also should not be necessary.

When thinking about the time scale it is good to remember DF is not a simulator. Dwarves probably would have eaten more than eight meals a year in reality, for example. DF is a game and it is willing to sacrifice some realism for gameplay's sake. With food you have the option to make dwarves eat the whole time, reduce the speed so that one dwarf day was say 30 minutes in real life, or you could accept that the dwarves are going to eat lot less than they realistically would. The same applies to research speed. It is not a good think to require the players to play the game for several hundred years, so it would be lot better for the players to just make new technologies available with much higher frequency.



Reading the neek's post further clarified the problem. Even though I don't like the solution, the metagaming of tech trees could be solved by making the target of research completely random.

I think the innovations neek described were made possible because the people responsible could afford to try them. I want to believe that if succeeding in a task is the only way to stay fed and you know a sure way of succeeding, you will not consider alternatives, unless, of course, you had huge confidence. Think tanks are a way to make sure people do not limit their imagination because they need immediate results, and if the population had been able to support that and there was no political or religious will of preventing new technology, I see no reason why that wouldn't have happened. In fact, I think the Greek philosophers formed think tanks of sorts. They didn't need to work to survive, so they dedicated their time better, and I trust we are all happy they did. I think many frailer and non-dwarfy dwarves would be glad to be able to decide between earning their living with mining or drinking red wine (like a hippy) in a chamber and thinking. It's not about who orders you to think, but if that is a possibility at all.

[EDIT]
neek, if you remember the name of the BBC production, please tell me. I think that would make my postings on the subject much less bad.
[/EDIT]

[Mephansteras]

Personally, I think you're approaching this the wrong way for Dwarf Fortress.

Since the goal Toady has set out for the game is to become a Fantasy World simulator, things like technological advancement should occur. However, they should occur at a reasonable rate.

My reasoning? Technological advancement, at least up to a point, should happen during world gen. It should occur during the times between fortresses when you skip ahead a hundred years before starting a new fortress or adventurer. And, yes, it should occasionally happen during fortress mode. But it should be a rare event that makes you go 'Oh, cool! I didn't know it was possible for my dwarves to discover how to do [X]'.

This isn't Civilization. The focus of the game isn't to reach the Space Age or anything like that. It's not even to be like Medieval Total War where you move along a set line of progression for technology based on who you are and what you do. It's to create a world, in a fantasy setting, with its own unique timeline and civilizations and heroes. Maybe you'll luck out and get someone like Archimedes who comes up with all sorts of fantastic inventions. A few of them might even make it into everyday life. Maybe you get a king who orders your alchemists to search for eternal life, and by doing so prompts the discovery of gunpowder. But these things should be an organic outcome from the game itself, not directed by the player and not something you really focus on.

If the player wants to encourage new thought and inventions maybe he should be able to encourage his resident alchemist or dungeon master, giving him high quality tools to work with and an amazing laboratory. Even then, it'd depend heavily on the dwarf in question. He might spend all his time trying to turn lead into gold, as so many alchemists did. Or he might stumble upon something amazing. Either way, it shouldn't be directed and it shouldn't be made 'gamy'.

I just don't think taking the Civilization approach to Tech is all that much in spirit with Dwarf Fortress' goals.

[Dellnak]

I admit I mostly am selfishly rambling here about stuff _I'd_ (me me me) like to see and do. And while I still think the basic strategy-game tech tree would be nice by adding a RPGish fortress development layer and another system to manage, it's not the most important thing for me and I know I would eventually be annoyed by it because I didn't have all the playing blocks immediately, much like I currently have to search for magma before I get to play with it.

I think one of the strengths of DF is that it can be played in a few different ways. Some people optimize their production to the end of the world, some set up superior military, some build systems harnessing nature's power, some flood the world with magma, etc (of course most people do more than one of those).

Adding a feature like this should be done only if it will satisfy a good portion of player base. I don't know what kind of alchemy/magic system Toady has planned, but if they are anything I'd do, technological developments might fit well in with only minor compromises.

I realize I really might have taken the wrong approach to this technology thing. Maybe instead of making thoughts about revolutionary advances, I should have considered research of more mundane level, which might be mostly optimization of different jobs. Make miners faster, make backpacks larger, make water wheel one power more productive, gene-engineer vomit to be cyan color, etc. It can be justly disputed if that kind of research is useful at all, but if that wasn't too time-consuming to program I'd leave the decision of research or not to research to players. It would not be as revolutionary as cloning machine for artifacts, but it would be a system to manage, and that's fun by itself.

[Bricks]

Only barely scratching the nub of your jist here (good lord, succinctness is a virtue!), but DF is not a traditional RTS.  It's hardly a nontraditional RTS.  "Research" is a process that could take a century to advance a topic to the point where it is actively applied.  DF has simulated world generation, and the flow of time in-game is relatively slow.  If you want to "research" something, you have two very weird things going on.  First of all, you are telling the dwarves exactly what they are researching.  It has the odd feeling of a god popping in, telling you what a gun is, and giving you a few years to develop it.  Second, it would be totally inconsistent with the passage of time in-game, and given the world-wide nature of the game, it would be very strange for every dwarf settlement to pass through every stage of technological development just to reach parity with the mountainhome.  If you want technologies to pop up through the passage of time during world gen, as to reflect the state of the art in ruins and older areas, that makes sense.  Your idea does not.

A lot of that "play it your own way" guff exists because end-game is so devoid of challenge and purpose.  Once Toady fleshes that out, megaprojects will be less about "hur hur I drowned the world with magam!11!1!" and more "I filled my outer walls with magma.  Any attacker hoping to blast their way in will very quickly learn what hell is."

Also keep in mind that "research" in an RTS is just an abstraction of a much more complicated, messy process.  If you want better items in DF, you don't start your dwarves in labcoats on ox-drawn plows (yeah, plows, suck it England) or pottery wheels.  You train those dwarves up.  That method allows better items to be developed by fort and adventurer alike.

[Belteshazzar]

I dislike the idea of any race advancing or evolving much in technology.

 However I do not feel that the player should be beholden to some sort of rule that says he can't make his dwarves manipulate properties of physics and meta-physics they themselves don't understand (personally, I think the pre-1400s statement seems rather arbitrary, and gets thrown around too much, but it is to preserve a certain 'flavor' in the game, and put a cap on everyone demanding plasma hoverbords and or steampunk.)


By contrast however, I would 'like' all the properties of materials and processes (explosives, conductivity, structural stress, reactivity, radioactivity, ect) necessary to create such great works to be in place.

It's like Conan and other Sword an Sorcery stories, such wondrous and unknown sciences exist... but they are rarely applied and only then by the great and powerful. These works a few and far between, renown as world wonders or forgotten as lost ruins of a golden age. These would be representative of player run communities in which the hand of a distant and creative god (the player) has poured forth his strange and terrible secrets.

[eerr]

Tech in dwarf fortress?
maybe in version two.

[Silverionmox]

If a player can arrange magma and water channels, floodgates, etc. in such a way that it makes a large scale steam engine, fine. He never should get to say: build me seven steam engines and research me a mechanized spinning wheel. Dwarves shouldn't know what a steam engine is, but as a mysterious megaproject, it's ok. The fun is in using modern knowledge about steam engines and computers to design something resembling those out of medieval parts, rather than ordering the dwarves to build them so you have an item or building named "steam engine".

[Roara Wolf]

If Dellnak's relatively more recent points are right...

It's a wonder dwarves aren't gods of technology, what with the ease of which fortresses tend to produce food, right now.

I like the ideas of small technological gains, but I think one should step back and look at what technology is.

Technology seems to consist of inventions, methods, and knowledge.

Methods could easily be simulated by improving (read: complicating) the skill system and adding in education.

Inventions can probably be divided into two things; new items entirely, and variant items. Variant items include the difference between, say, a shortsword and a longsword. New items entirely is closer to the difference between a shortsword and a bucket. Both could be done by unlocking features that were locked previous to their discovery, but variant items could also be generated during gameplay.

Knowledge is the interesting part. Unless you randomly generate everything in the world, every player who checks out the wiki (or has reasonable gameplay experience) is pretty knowledgable. Sadly, they automatically pass this fact unto their fortresses, and thus unless you lock certain actions that would require certain facts to unlock, it's pretty much impossible to explore the development of knowledge. It's even more difficult to explore the spread of knowledge as it happens through the population. Even in a randomly generated world, once the player knows that the ore that begins with a C and the ore that begins with a D can be merged into an alloy that begins with E, that player will always know that fact (assuming, of course, they don't just forget; a possibility almost completely removed from gameplay).

To compare my points with what the game currently has, and in some cases reiterate them...

Methods are currently on an individual level; no dwarf can communicate them, and each dwarf is capable of going from the lowest tech to the godlike supertech make fifty deathapults in a minute level.

Inventions are currently predefined in the entity raws, with no ability to change. The world is at a stand-still, technologically speaking. Presently, dwarves are probably the kings of technology, able to mold rivers and magma at their command. I believe that humans are technically incapable of doing this with the same capability but only because they cannot make pumps. I forget where goblins and elves rest, but elves only use wood, so they clearly lack the technological means (or drive) to do any sort of metalworking. Finally, kobolds mostly have copper goods, so clearly they cannot work with anything better... which is slightly confusing, because the game mechanic that enforces this fact seems a flat "they only make copper stuff." Of course, the game is for dwarves, and it's likely they've just found methods that the kobolds are assumed not to have, without the lack of such methods actually being programmed into the game.

And, of course, for knowledge, any given fortress has the knowledge of its player, and the resources that player deems worthy of his or her time. With a wiki and a decent sized player base, it's no wonder the philosopher just sits around; there's nothing left to figure out! (Alternatively, the player was secretly the philosopher('s eternally reincarnating soul)!)

Of course, those are just the means which I would break down technology as it would apply to Dwarf Fortress. I'm sure there're better means, and I'm sure you all can think of them. I just thought I'd throw out some definitions and examples of what already exists, to keep things in perspective.

[Bricks]

I don't think you can justify technology based on how the game is currently balanced.  Yes, food needs work.

If you try to allow advancement during fort play, you are going to have problems with new players.  They'll gen a world where dwarves haven't yet learned how to mine, and wonder why anyone would play such a crappy game.

[orbcontrolled]

How does this sound for technology: Technology is something that can only be "discovered" by being implemented. Depending on how well it is implemented, maybe it becomes part of the world.

Example, and proposed gameplay mechanism
Take the mist generator, a perfect example of dwarven technological innovation. Some dwarf tries to build a metronome, and ends up with a device that can make his dining room the most luxurious place in the empire.
Imagine if a player could build a mister for their dining room, and then get their dwarves to consolidate it into a building. The misting building then becomes a piece of technology that your civilization knows but others don't. It proceeds to spread across the world in the minds of your civs high-level mechanics, being aquired by conquering civs, being traded to other civs, or more often than not just dying out because everyone who knew how to do it died.
But if everything went perfectly, then in a hundred years you might start a fortress in the same world and find that "Mist generator" was on your list of buildings.

Another example:
The first clock in the world would be a fortress that used complex waterways to irrigate and drain fields at specified times of year. A dwarf in a strange mood or something studies that massive effort, and replicates it in the form of a building full of glass tubes and levers and reservoirs that acts as a primitive water clock. Subsequent dwarfs might even refine it into a mechanism to be built at a mechanics shop.

Insanity978, EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY
The biggest challenge, and the backbone of my idea, would be to make technological progress natural. That is; not along a pre-defined tree. In a perfect game, anything the player does with the physics system (Or for that matter, anything the dwarves do without player intervention!) should be eligible to become technology. If you use magma to boil steam and channel it under the kings bedroom, and it should evolve into central heating, not because of an entry in the raws labeled "[CENTRALHEATING][PREREQUISITE="BLAHBLAHBLAH"][RESULTS="BLAHBLAHBLAH"][etc.]", but because the AI recognized a complex system and encapsulated the logic.

Because of this mechanic, useless systems would also get preserved as technology. There would be hundreds of buildings and clockwork mechanisms that fail to do anything, either because the system they were created from didn't work, or didn't translate well into other circumstances. Technological developments might get culled over time if dwarves spend too long not getting practical use out of them.
The unpredictable nature would ensure that players could influence technology, while preventing them from racing through pre-determined trees.

Reality check
This would obviously require a far more complex simulation than DF currently is. The physics system would have to be even more complete, so that the utility of, say, a copper pipe could arise naturally from what it was rather than an entry in a raw saying "[trANSFERHEAT][trANSFERWATER][OTHERSUCHNONSENSE]". Additionally, the ability to recognize general systems and encapsulate their logic is deep into the territory of evolutionary algorithms, strong AI, and who knows what else. Certainly it is beyond present day commercially available technology, but who cares, it's fun to speculate anyway. Armok knows no practical ideas will come out of this thread so we might as well have fun.

[Granite26]

One important reason for a unified tech strategy is that it would allow different races to have different technologies. 

There needs to be a single system for determining what civs have bronze, steel, adamant, as well as different weapon/armor types, mechanisms, alchemical reactions, etc.

Once you've got a system that can handle the differences between dwarves and goblins, it's almost trivial to expand it to handle differences between yesterday and today.

(Also, it's a good cheat for world gen...  Humans about to get wiped out?  Give them stirrups and watch them come back!)

[Dellnak]

If a player can arrange magma and water channels, floodgates, etc. in such a way that it makes a large scale steam engine, fine. He never should get to say: build me seven steam engines and research me a mechanized spinning wheel. Dwarves shouldn't know what a steam engine is, but as a mysterious megaproject, it's ok. The fun is in using modern knowledge about steam engines and computers to design something resembling those out of medieval parts, rather than ordering the dwarves to build them so you have an item or building named "steam engine".

I might have been unclear in the past, but designing advanced machinery by using primitive components is what I wanted, not any named ready-to-work black-box facilities.

But I don't think the components are the most important thing here, it's the mechanics. For example steam engine must have realistic enough behavior of gases, transfer of heat, and preferably something to compress gas with. Again I don't want a workshop that gets 10 units of uncompressed gas as input and gives one unit of compressed gas as output but rather gasproof enough movable walls, ceilings and floors, and a few basic ways to apply force to them such as gravitational force, manual dwarfy force, lateral pressure by water and other gases, etc. Walls might of course require regular lubricating or the energy cost of pushing them one tile would increase with use.

In fact, I would like to see several DF's current workshops "opened" a bit. For example instead of current smelting and melting, it would be fun to have to put an item or several item (mass-production yay) to some kind of well-insulated chamber, then actually heat the chamber with something - coal, for example, like we have done in our black boxes before - to high enough temperature. Instead of magically transforming to bars after that the metal could become molten (that is, liquid) and then the molten metal could be channeled to a bar-shaped mold tile or to an artificial sea of liquid metal, or whatever. As an added bonus, some better - especially magma-proof - metals would be really difficult to smelt, because the temperature needed required capturing a spirit of fire or using some complex machinery to produce the needed temperature.

[bluea]

If you accept "Discoveries by implementation", then it is possible that they might reduce FPS hell somewhat.

That is: One might be able to make some of these things "non-flows" and thus requiring a lot less detailed modeling on the 1/7th-of-a-square-of-water level.

Congratulations: you've made  a four-story structure that takes in a square of water, keeps a constant mist in these sixteen tiles, and returns exactly one square of water to this exit square. Now it is a -building- that does exactly the same thing. (With rules that can break the building - like magma flowing through, etc.) Next time you want a mist generator, it shows up under "Your Designs" (or whatever) as "My cool thing #1" and just demands the appropriate materials and skills for an identical design.

A swath of the interesting things that -can- be done with the available tools are just crushed by the FPS cost. If you could designate a random cubical area as "a construction" and pre-calculate all the effects of replacing all the subcomponents by a single object... I'd think that would have the potential of completely avoiding explicitly adding anything verboten while still being quite useful and improving speed to boot.

[Silverionmox]

If a player can arrange magma and water channels, floodgates, etc. in such a way that it makes a large scale steam engine, fine. He never should get to say: build me seven steam engines and research me a mechanized spinning wheel. Dwarves shouldn't know what a steam engine is, but as a mysterious megaproject, it's ok. The fun is in using modern knowledge about steam engines and computers to design something resembling those out of medieval parts, rather than ordering the dwarves to build them so you have an item or building named "steam engine".

I might have been unclear in the past, but designing advanced machinery by using primitive components is what I wanted, not any named ready-to-work black-box facilities.

But I don't think the components are the most important thing here, it's the mechanics. For example steam engine must have realistic enough behavior of gases, transfer of heat, and preferably something to compress gas with. Again I don't want a workshop that gets 10 units of uncompressed gas as input and gives one unit of compressed gas as output but rather gasproof enough movable walls, ceilings and floors, and a few basic ways to apply force to them such as gravitational force, manual dwarfy force, lateral pressure by water and other gases, etc. Walls might of course require regular lubricating or the energy cost of pushing them one tile would increase with use.

In fact, I would like to see several DF's current workshops "opened" a bit. For example instead of current smelting and melting, it would be fun to have to put an item or several item (mass-production yay) to some kind of well-insulated chamber, then actually heat the chamber with something - coal, for example, like we have done in our black boxes before - to high enough temperature. Instead of magically transforming to bars after that the metal could become molten (that is, liquid) and then the molten metal could be channeled to a bar-shaped mold tile or to an artificial sea of liquid metal, or whatever. As an added bonus, some better - especially magma-proof - metals would be really difficult to smelt, because the temperature needed required capturing a spirit of fire or using some complex machinery to produce the needed temperature.

That would be very interesting, and the right way to go imo. Working with the mechanics rather than drawing rabbits out of the hat. There's an item in the eternal voting list that already that adresses that,  but channeling molten metal into mould or baking bricks in designated rooms didn't come up yet in the accompanying thread.

[Pjoo]

What about research on diseases, poisons, toxins etc? It requires research to know the symptoms for diagnosing and to know the proper treatment. It would be quite hard to treat a disease/poison without having any idea what symptoms it causes or having any idea how to treat it. And it wouldn't make any sense that dwarf would magically know how to treat certain diseases, or what anti-poison to use, assuming the dwarf could even diagnose the disease/poison. And well, medical books for education of diagnosing only work so well, as you cannot actually manufacture them without research. You would have to buy all the information and that wouldn't be really dwarvish.
Oor, the system will be oversimplified, which would be kinda lame. I want dwarves with diseases from tuberculosis to genetic disorders to heavy metal poisoning.
Ok, genes might kinda drop the fps too much...
 
In 14th century Europe, we would've diagnosed disorder in the nervous system as demonic possession, and the treatment would be burning at the stake, with such primitive medicine and world view, it's actually not that idiotic.
Without modern chemistry, not every condition will have treatment, but there are quite many conditions that can be cured or treated with substances from nature.