Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Zargen]

Just a thought from a question a friend asked me.

What about the addition of a fast forward button during Fortress mode?

I.E. hitting a hotkey that increases the IG time by x10 or what ever. And slows down to a pause and normal speed when ever something important happens(anything important enough to pause the game) otherwise it continues at super speed until you stop it.

Thoughts?

[alfie275]

Yeah because thats not going to lag...

[profit]

Because more often than not dwarf fortress is running at its limit, there is no feasible way of implementing this.  Now if DF was only using 10% of a proccessor then it would be possible, but it almost always uses 100% and then starts to slow down the simulation speed.

Maybe after massive upgrades to code efficiency (Not saying its possible, maybe DF is already coded in the most efficient manner possible)
Or after massive parrallization and threading and for people with 8 cores.. this might become possible.

[Neonivek]

Hmm for a while there I thought someone was reviving the "Skip Time" idea where you can basically skip several years into the future.

[alfie275]

Yeah but that was re-worldgenning nad wouldnt actually simulate the fortress, just look at the numbers, ie food produced and eaten per year etc.

[shadowclasper]

Until the Dwarf AI gets MUCH smarter. I don't even want to touch this. Not jumping foward by days, months, years or ANYTHING.

[darius]

Actually there is a way to speed up (not much though) similar to adventurer Sleep. Just make some key turn printing to screen off. This should increase TPS (ticks per second) somewhat... But yeah till DF is not optimized to hell and back no miracles here (without short cuts)

[Neonivek]

Well skipping Years of time shouldn't work by running the AI. It should guess by the players actions in the previous year (as well perhaps the player could set some of their automatic actions) as well as any current actions set and follow that pattern.

Though any sort of emergency should allow you to jump out of it.

[Soralin]

An in-game way of adjusting the FPS cap would be nice and simple way of doing this, although limited if it's currently at it's maximum.  Especially useful if further optimizations or such are done to make things run faster.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Actually whats needed is a DECOUPLING of the simulation speed and the frame rate, then you can start playing with both in game to see what trade offs are desirable.

[shadowform]

Honestly, even with dwarf AI as it is, fast forwarding a month/year at a time couldn't get much worse.  At best, most human interference has a minimal effect on containing the madness of dwarves, and often times they would be much better off without us constantly flooding their tunnels with water and magma.

[profit]

Actually whats needed is a DECOUPLING of the simulation speed and the frame rate, then you can start playing with both in game to see what trade offs are desirable.

The decoupling has already happened, you can have a max gfps and the simulation CAN run MUCH faster than the actual fps. (I checked this using Fraps to make sure)

It cannot go the other way around...

The simulation has to simulate a full tick before it can be used safely.

That said, for most of us, the simulations FPS is the limiting factor, not how fast open GL can dump it to the screen. (Actually should call it simulation ticks per second or STPS as Frames per second is misleading, and can be entirely separate from displayed frames per second.)

[koter]

Honestly, even with dwarf AI as it is, fast forwarding a month/year at a time couldn't get much worse.  At best, most human interference has a minimal effect on containing the madness of dwarves, and often times they would be much better off without us constantly flooding their tunnels with water and magma.

I am sorry for necromancing, but I have been very interested in this issue for a while. In fact, I though it could be great if we could run the history generation process that takes place upon world gen, but with an existing fortress we built and historical figures we shaped as the basis.

I made a few experiments: created a safe, self-sufficient fortress (spent quite a while on it, too), set the nopause to 1 in DHack, which means the game won't pause even for artifacts and sieges, and let the game sit overnight several times. The results were grim.

There were, of course, some amuzing facts, like one of the legendary cooks coming back from the dead with the sole purpose of preparing masterful meals for all eternity (which he did, as the fortress was crumbling around him), massacres by a merchant yak cow, and wars being declared with friendly dwarven civilizations. But, in the end, you will never get a happy ending, like those thriving civilizations that we see upon embark that have been around, it seems, forever. The best your efforts can do is give them another 5-10 years until it all goes downhill. And it's almost never due to sieges or megabeasts - it's the tantrum spirals and/or their side effects, like all brewers getting killed by a rampaging dwarf and another dwarf being thrown down a well by a vengeful ghost, which led to total dehydration.

To sum up - there is a way to skip years, but it won't be pretty. Be warned.

[blaster339]

I'll be supporting this idea

[GreatWyrmGold]

koter, it's perfectly fine to necromance threads in the Suggestions subforum if you contribute something to them. You did. Congratulations. Lots of people don't.

The biggest problem with fast-forward is related to why people would want it: Fortress Mode as-is is REALLY slow. That's a big problem with accumulating issues which will only be seriously solved once Toady feels most of them have accumulated, barring FPS so slow DF becomes unplayable.