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[SIGVARDR]

Whether they could have made a working,usable steam engine or not makes no difference,because they didn't.
 The 1400's era is being represented quite nicely as is,And the fantasy elements are fantasy.I would rather not see DF move into a more technologically advanced era,game-wise.Moddable? sure.But lets get the main stuff fleshed out before adding more to the daunting to-do list toady already has.

An animal powered pump would better fit the time line,akin to the pumps we already have in game that dwarfs use.

[Coidzure Dreams]

So what's the deal with magma forges and the capability to pump it then?

That seems even more anachronistic.  Considering we don't have the capability with our modern tech.

[BlazingDav]

To be honest the end point of this is supposed to be a fantasy story generator, you do get a steam fantasy genre, but it'd be more work for Toady to do this

Though you could probably get away with creatures made of metal and what not that had to sleep in a cog chamber or steam chamber and stuff to have your steampunk critters and stuff or rather vermin pests that tap into your cogs and gears causing you trouble, as a primary existence. Steam engines could probably exist as moddable but primarily useless toys your nobles demand.

Then you have the building blocks for modding steam stuff in, but they exist as a hassle to the fortress in vanilla (darn nobles wanting a useless steam engine toy and vermin stopping those oh so vital pumps keeping the magma out your fort).

The way I like to think of stuff primarily personally is how the dwarves would have got their hands on it, I mean dwarves are creatures of the Earth its fair to say one day a noble with magma heated flooring and an empty head would one day be filled with an idea that spilt water on it evaporates, then said noble would have a hot water bath in the demands list and the eccentric noble would continue to play with steam till he started demanding glass when there is no sand and inevitably find himself in a steam chamber scolded to death.

[Sizik]

A cuirass isn't "plate armor"? It's made from a plate of metal. Well, okay, maybe it's made from two, but still.

A cuirass is not 'plate mail', nor would most people consider lamellar to be 'plate mail'.

Edit: I did not use the term 'plate armor'.  It covers a wider class of armors than plate mail.

(emphasis mine)

I think he means

not

[Footkerchief]

^^^ He said this, though:

When i say plate mail i mean the fully integrated armor of the late medieval period.  The romans did not know how to make it.

So that pretty much rules out plated mail.

[JohnieRWilkins]

I haven't ever really cared about steamy gimmicks in DF, but I definitely think that steam should be a modeled "flow."

Sure your dwarves, elves, humans or goblins may not be able to make logic gates, computers, pressurized water cannons, or artificial volcanoes. But why should that stop you, Armok, from harnessing a power your subjects have never even imagined?

All steam power would require is a gas flow model and a water-wheel that interacts with the steam flow. When buoyancy is modeled, you can even go nuts with steam-powered HFSclads and what not. Is that really more game-breaking than the magma siege solution?

I'm personally a giant fan of DF waterworks and I certainly doubt that I'm the only one. Steam would give us another toy to play with.

[SIGVARDR]

Flow models are a bit more work than people think.just listen to DFtalk number 8 for example.Right now water and magma cancel each other out.putting in a flow model that would exist in the same tile and react without destroying the other flow is a bit complicated.Do-able,but complicated.

Buoyancy is also another issue discussed therein.

[JohnieRWilkins]

Flow models are a bit more work than people think.just listen to DFtalk number 8 for example.Right now water and magma cancel each other out.putting in a flow model that would exist in the same tile and react without destroying the other flow is a bit complicated.Do-able,but complicated.

Buoyancy is also another issue discussed therein.

Oh wow you're right, I totally missed that podcast. Especially the part where he talked about STEAM MIXING WITH MAGMA OR WATER.

[G-Flex]

I haven't ever really cared about steamy gimmicks in DF, but I definitely think that steam should be a modeled "flow."

Sure your dwarves, elves, humans or goblins may not be able to make logic gates, computers, pressurized water cannons, or artificial volcanoes. But why should that stop you, Armok, from harnessing a power your subjects have never even imagined?

The problem here is that when you start modeling things really well, you run the risk of creating an extreme discontinuity between player knowledge and in-universe knowledge. I mean, in theory, if chemistry and physics were simulated well, you could trivially just embark on a site and build a goddamn electric power plant and start the Dwarven Manhattan Project. Well, maybe not the Manhattan Project, but the point is that it is a little weird when the player is allowed to get ridiculously outside the scope of the gameworld at large in terms of technology.

Currently, it's not a big deal, because most of that stuff is defined in terms of what a civilization is allowed to do. In this sense, most of the out-of-depth technology crap people are doing is purely informational (computers and junk) rather than, say, electrolytically smelting aluminum or mass-producing mustard gas and penicillin.

[Footkerchief]

Flow models are a bit more work than people think.just listen to DFtalk number 8 for example.Right now water and magma cancel each other out.putting in a flow model that would exist in the same tile and react without destroying the other flow is a bit complicated.Do-able,but complicated.

Buoyancy is also another issue discussed therein.

Oh wow you're right, I totally missed that podcast. Especially the part where he talked about STEAM MIXING WITH MAGMA OR WATER.

It's not about them mixing per se, it's about them coexisting in the same tile.  Right now the liquid flows are stored as part of the map tiles, which have a very rigid structure for performance reasons.  There are three bits for flow depth and one bit for flow type (water/magma) -- that's it.  As you can see, this structure has no provision for liquid flows coexisting.  Gas flows might or might not need to be stored as part of the map tile -- the current gas flows (including steam) are dynamically allocated and can therefore coexist, but they also lack any real notion of pressure and other gas-law stuff, and modeling those properties might cause prohibitively bad performance on the dynamically allocated system.  If that's the case, then yeah, you'd have to find extra bits in the map tile to let them "mix."

[G-Flex]

Or handle them entirely differently from the start. And like Toady said in the DF Talk, the question of how to reasonably allow different flows to mix/interact is not a very easy problem, especially considering performance.

[LegoLord]

Excuse me, but:
Plate mail is not steam technology.  One, plate mail is less complex.  Two, the Romans did not make very good steam powered machines at all.  Armor on the other hand could be made to reasonably good quality, hence its actual use.  Four, this actual use of armor led to its further development; the apparent uselessness of steam led to the tech being lost, rather than developed. 

So, that in mind, why would one reasonably expect steam to be a viable power source in the 1400s?  Or at least, why would anyone use plate mail as an example of why it could?  It does not make since.  They are two different things, that developed in different ways, and there was a great difference in the technical and mathematical knowledge required for making plate mail than for making an effective steam engine.

[JohnieRWilkins]

Flow models are a bit more work than people think.just listen to DFtalk number 8 for example.Right now water and magma cancel each other out.putting in a flow model that would exist in the same tile and react without destroying the other flow is a bit complicated.Do-able,but complicated.

Buoyancy is also another issue discussed therein.

Oh wow you're right, I totally missed that podcast. Especially the part where he talked about STEAM MIXING WITH MAGMA OR WATER.

It's not about them mixing per se, it's about them coexisting in the same tile.  Right now the liquid flows are stored as part of the map tiles, which have a very rigid structure for performance reasons.  There are three bits for flow depth and one bit for flow type (water/magma) -- that's it.  As you can see, this structure has no provision for liquid flows coexisting.  Gas flows might or might not need to be stored as part of the map tile -- the current gas flows (including steam) are dynamically allocated and can therefore coexist, but they also lack any real notion of pressure and other gas-law stuff, and modeling those properties might cause prohibitively bad performance on the dynamically allocated system.  If that's the case, then yeah, you'd have to find extra bits in the map tile to let them "mix."

How about running a test whenever steam needs to be generated? A 7/7 tile of water would be the only tile capable of generating steam. All other tiles would simply generate an abstracted, unpressurized vapor, or even nothing at all if that option proves to eat cycles. The test would check the tile above a heated water tile (and if the tile above it is a water tile, then it'd check the one above that etc...) to determine whether it is an open space or a ceiling. If an open space is present, steam is generated in that tile. If a ceiling is present, that tile of water simply increases in temperature beyond the boiling threshold.

I'm not a programmer, but that sounds less process-killing than the flow tracking option to me and it accomplishes the task of modeling steam dynamics better than any other game on the market. Objections?

I haven't ever really cared about steamy gimmicks in DF, but I definitely think that steam should be a modeled "flow."

Sure your dwarves, elves, humans or goblins may not be able to make logic gates, computers, pressurized water cannons, or artificial volcanoes. But why should that stop you, Armok, from harnessing a power your subjects have never even imagined?

The problem here is that when you start modeling things really well, you run the risk of creating an extreme discontinuity between player knowledge and in-universe knowledge. I mean, in theory, if chemistry and physics were simulated well, you could trivially just embark on a site and build a goddamn electric power plant and start the Dwarven Manhattan Project. Well, maybe not the Manhattan Project, but the point is that it is a little weird when the player is allowed to get ridiculously outside the scope of the gameworld at large in terms of technology.

Currently, it's not a big deal, because most of that stuff is defined in terms of what a civilization is allowed to do. In this sense, most of the out-of-depth technology crap people are doing is purely informational (computers and junk) rather than, say, electrolytically smelting aluminum or mass-producing mustard gas and penicillin.

Why is universe-player discontinuity a problem? Do you mean to say that we all know the world better than the characters we're role-playing? In DF we're role-playing Armok, the god of blood. Shouldn't we be granted awesome knowledge nobody else has?

These anomalies can easily be explained away like the artifacts are. You're a god who posessed your hundred dwarves to make an artifact power plant. There are no other power plants in the world. You've done an amazing and magical thing. Free beer fountains for everyone!

I think that you're not considering the whole picture either. The difficulty of achieving a task should also factor into the decision of including a task. Face it, mega-projects are fun. Mega-projects that do retardedly awesome things are more fun. Making retardedly awesome mega-projects in DF is loads of fun and is definitely one of the main attractions of the game mode.

[Andeerz]

The problem here is that when you start modeling things really well, you run the risk of creating an extreme discontinuity between player knowledge and in-universe knowledge. I mean, in theory, if chemistry and physics were simulated well, you could trivially just embark on a site and build a goddamn electric power plant and start the Dwarven Manhattan Project. Well, maybe not the Manhattan Project, but the point is that it is a little weird when the player is allowed to get ridiculously outside the scope of the gameworld at large in terms of technology.

On the other hand, when you start modeling things really well, you also simulate many of the very things that made building a power plant back in the day near impossible anyway, i.e. the requirement of having the necessary infrastructure and economic base to build the stuff and implement the technology.

The knowledge thing is only part of the puzzle, albeit an important one. I'm no expert on steam power, but I do know a thing or two about the development of plate armor.  The technology and knowledge for heat treated steel plate in Europe seen in the 15th century has definitely existed since at least the late Roman Empire (even earlier in China).  However, it was not widely implemented for many reasons, among them lack of availability of good quality iron ore, and that it was not economically viable to outfit soldiers with such armor (both these reasons play on each other).  I imagine the same would go for something like the aeropile, the primitive steam engine.  Prototype steam engines developed after the medieval era probably weren't any more efficient or "good" (whatever that means) than the aeolipile, though I need more evidence to back that up.  If the drive was there, the technology could have been developed sooner.     

[JohnieRWilkins]

Yuh and knowledge of the Bessemer process and modern chemistry wouldn't make it "efficient" to make good quality iron from excrement.

I'm sorry but knowledge is essentially the only limiting reagent here since capital goods and slave labor might as well be interchangeable. There is plenty of the latter in DF. This is a pointless argument.