Print

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

[I3erent]

Now load on the processor is a real concern but i dont think much should be made about memory required.

If it makes the world more detailed i wouldnt mind.  In fact as the price of memory continues to drop i would consider buying a 100gig external drive just for dwarf fortress!!!

Then we could have two hemispheres instead of one.

In conclusion I dont think memory requirements matter unless you are playing on a laptop or off your usb drive.

[AlanL]

When I'm running DF, i find that other applications running alongside it tend to be bigger ram-hoggers than DF. In fact, loading the world-map or local map in GIMP makes it chew up a ridiculous amount of ram (150 megs for one image on my machine). Firefox has a habit of latching onto ram and not giving it back unless you close out of it. DF on the other hand takes, I think, about 50-70 megs fully loaded.

As far as CPU, I just change program priorities when I want something else to run faster than DF, or if I want to stop something from interfering with DF.

[Jaqie Fox]

BMPs are huge memory hogs, so don't blame GIMP for that. Editing images is also a memory hog... if you think 150MB is bad, try editing some vector based graphics for a vynil sign... Ive had clients with 3GB run out constantly just running an image editing app working on them (when 3GB of RAM took a sun workstation and $8,000 in RAM alone)

Firefox is infamous for being extremely inefficient with memory usage, it's one of the reasons I hate it.  Opera is actually much kinder to the memory footprint so if you care about RAM use, use it.

Berent: RAM usage and HDD usage are *WAY* different.  Buying another HDD will not improve any program's in-memory performance much if at all unless your system is already badly RAM starved.  In short: get more RAM.

[Tamren]

CPUs are really the chokepoint, all those calculations have to be dealt with and stored in ram. Unless you are generating new worlds ram is rarely stressed.

Hopefully Toady will make DF run better with multiple cores, apparantly DF already runs 2 threads, so a dual core will work better.

[Capntastic]

I don't see how this is a suggestion but right now DF world saves are like 50-100mb and I can't see that increasing much more than double anytime soon.   Most people can spare that, I think.

[I3erent]

Yeah i wasnt refering to RAM or  getting the hard drive to improve performance.

I just meant that I dont care how much space DF takes up on my hard drive and i woldnt mind if it took up more if we could have a larger world with two hemispheres proper.

[Thallone]

But... but... My worlds are flat, and you can't prove otherwise. It is, after all, fantasy.

[Turgid Bolk]

Yes, and who's to say the map isn't just a flat projection of a sphere?

By the way, what happens when you walk to the edge of the world map, then one step further?

[I3erent]

quote:Originally posted by Turgid Bolk:
<STRONG>Yes, and who's to say the map isn't just a flat projection of a sphere?

By the way, what happens when you walk to the edge of the world map, then one step further?</STRONG>

Toady says so. He said it is displaying one hemisphere and a portion of the poles methinks.

And if you go to the edge of the map you hit an invisible wall my friend, an invisible wall.

[Capntastic]

Which is a shame given that everything else is super realistic.

But hopefully when we have ships and more realistic continents with islands and stuff, we'll have the ability to traverse the globe.

[Toady One]

A flat projection of a sphere is somewhat tricky.  You can't represent everything with a rectangle, anyway, not without distortion or tearing.  You can't even do a portion of a sphere without distortion.  So, the current world is distorted, if you assume it's spherical in the first place.  Right now the edge blocks, but what did you want?  If you wrap around the left/right edges, you have a cylindrical world.  If you walk off the top, you have to decide where you want that to go as well, and you can either end up with a torus or some kind of weird projective space depending on how you define it, but you're not going to get a sphere if you want a rectangular map.  An actual sphere would require significant revisions to world map storage and how it interprets the local maps in that space.

We have lots of land now because water is relatively pointless space.  This can change when ships go in, yeah.  It also doesn't simulate an entire world so that repopulation can occur from the edges and shores of edge-touching oceans.  I haven't done the Life Cycles arc, but even after I do, world population will probably always have a downward trend if the world is self-contained, unless the game is relatively non-violent.

[JT]

Wow, that would be an interesting project: to create a genuinely spherical game world in an epic-scale RPG.  Every RPG I've ever heard of has been mapped onto a plane, even 3D-rendered worlds like the one in Final Fantasy 7.

I suppose you could get away with hacking a seamless spherical game world in a tile-based RPG by ever-so-slightly staggering maps as you leave the equator heading north or south, making the middle maps shrink in size proportionally.  The top of the screen would always have to be where the character was facing and not due north, however, due to the fact that if you head due north along a line of longitude on Earth you eventually end up heading south.

The map at the pole might be tough, since you'd have to line up the edges of four square maps, one for each of the four semispheres of the globe.  There'd still be ever-so-slight tearing at the staggered joints of the maps when you wound up passing a map boundary and changing your bearing with respect to the equator.

It would, of course, be much easier in 3D.

[ October 28, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]

[I3erent]

Im dreaming of a whole planetary systen of spheres maybe you could travel to the other planets by going thru the underworld.....

Whatever toady does im sure it will rock i just wanted to say that i dont care how much space df takes up on my hard drive thats all.