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[Sting_Auer]

A fog in the evil zones that creates fog on adjacent tiles.

The fog slowly destroys structures and acts as a weak acid to your dwarves. If a dwarf is standing in it, the Fog will slowly eat at the dwarf's flesh. However, this fog is held back by totems. They will slowly spread towards the totems though. Higher quality totems will hold them back at a greater distance and for a longer amount of time.

The Fog can be destroyed by blunt weapons. When a tile of this fog is destroyed, it would leave behind "Fog Essence", which can be used to decorate weapons and items with. A totem decorated with this fog will deter zombies/skeletals and Clowns (You know what I mean), but will not hold them back permanently.

 A weapon decorated with this would enhance it's damage and effectiveness against fog.


Good idea?

[Bdthemag]

Seems like a good idea to me, would add more fun to the evil embarks.

[Sting_Auer]

The fog is relatively weak, so it shouldn't be much of an issue there.

The problem is that it keeps spreading. It is near impossible to remove it all. Also, the more there is, the faster is spreads.

[IT 000]

Great idea with one three letter flaw. Lag. Personally, I am not quite sold on the whole 'Totems to ward off x foe' idea. It seems to deplete the Fun of things.

[Conflict]

Wouldn't it be possible to encase your totems with walls, thus making them impossible to be destroyed (and in effect stopping The Fog)

[Bdthemag]

Wouldn't it be possible to encase your totems with walls, thus making them impossible to be destroyed (and in effect stopping The Fog)

I assume the Totems would diminish in power after a time, and the fog would destroy buildings and walls.

[Dwarven WMD]

Why doesn't it eat the ground, then?

It does sound like an overall good idea though. We already have one fog, but a fog that actually means something other than "Cloudy with a chance of OH SHI-" is great.
Though the fog should come in different flavors, not just acidic.
Ideas that come to mind:
Acidic Fog - The vanilla one just suggested.
Hallucinogenic Fog - Fog that distorts objects and can cause anyone and anything to see disturbing things.
Blinding Fog - Like the normal fog in Adventure Mode, but when an adventurer is caught inside of it, vision is restricted more than usual and at night it is impossible to see beyond the tile you're already standing on. In Fortress Mode, it should cause your dwarves to get lost. Anything should get hampered inside of it, really.
Red Fog - Special fog that all sorts of foul things like to hide inside of. Should cause alarm for anyone inside of it.
Disease Fog - Should make people ill and cause wounds to be infected. Black plague fog, anyone?
Malevolent Fog - Fog that can change between any type. Probably should be what hangs over an incredibly evil place. Or the White House.

Maybe instead of totems and fighting the fog, we simply can't destroy the fog but just need special buildings? Like torches that prevent the spread of Blinding Fog into a building? Disease fog could possibly leave some sort of infection. Malevolent Fog just sits outside of buildings, waiting their sinisterly.
If we have evil fog, it should be damned well hard to cope with.

[Jeoshua]

I love the idea but:

Ow, my FPS.

[Dwarven WMD]

Well the normal fog doesn't actually show up. Perhaps this fog could just recolor the ground to show where it is?

[Jeoshua]

It's not so much the visuals, it's the calculation of it's volume spreading.

If, on the other hand, every tile in a given region was the same, and only outside squares were foggy, it could work.  It would be a weather thing, not a fluid.  So, leaving the front door open means that you wouldn't have to worry about the fog comming in.  The fog is for Outside tiles, not Indoors.

Thinking of it, DF already sort of has the code for the fog.  If you wander around in adventurer mode, every once in while there are clouds which reduce visibility greatly, without severely affecting FPS.  If one were to use this, and merely make the fog "visible" as a tile of grey water beyond a certain vantage point, it would work nicely.

After all, what is fog but a very low cloud?

[Dwarven WMD]

Jeoshua - the only person on Earth who can explain my ideas concretely when I'm words fail me.

[Sting_Auer]

Read the thread again.


The fog does in fact destroy walls and whatnot slowly. It also will slowly spread towards totems. Placing a totem would delete all fog inside the totems range, but the fog would slowly spread towards the fog again.

Also, this shouldn't cause all that much lag. he only calculation taking place is "if fog present = false & adjacent block = fog present, create fog on said block."

This calculation would only take place on maps that have fog to start with. It is a relatively simple calculation.

[Jeoshua]

Also, this shouldn't cause all that much lag. he only calculation taking place is "if fog present = false & adjacent block = fog present, create fog on said block."

... which takes place for EVERY fog tile, on EVERY frame.  FPS nightmare.  Set all the grass in an area on fire, and you'll get a similar dip in FPS.

Seriously, tile-by-tile fog would be very intensive on the processor, no matter what you made it do.  Even a simple check of it's neighboring tiles would be very intensive.  For one region tile, that's 48x48x8 = 18432 calculations.  And that's not factoring in anything that it's DOING in that check.  That's just memory access.  And that's just one region tile.  Also, it's just ONE z level of checks... if the fog can go up and down, that's 59904 memory searches for one Z level of neighbor-checking, not factoring in WHAT it's doing, just touching those memory spots.

So yeah.  It would hurt FPS.  Severely.

Science'd.

[Sting_Auer]

You make a great point. Disregard what I said about the calculations XP


However, wouldn't it cause about the same amount of lag as miasma? I was actually envisioning the Fog to be kind of like miasma, except not dissipate naturally and spread.

[Jeoshua]

It would be very similar to Miasma, actually.  And if you've ever gone up against a horde of Zombies, rotting and spreading that purple junk all over your screen, you'd be as sure as I am that it would absolutely kill your FPS.

BUT! As a region feature, for which the only calculation per-tile is "Is it outside? Is there fog in this region? Okay well then do foggy things.", the FPS hit would be very negligible, as long as the fog wasn't doing anything more complex than damaging buildings or reducing visibility.