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[Lectorog]

I recently got bored with my blood-drenched, nigh booze-less obsidian mini-fortress suspended above a volcano, so I naturally decided to drop it in. Somewhere along the end-process (I assume at the point where the cave-in would happen) the game froze. I very rarely have game freezes, and no more than a few seconds for most cave-in pauses.

Now this comes around to the general question and discussion over whether cave-ins require large amount of processing power; and what, exactly, about the cave-in affects this. I, personally, haven't a clue. Has anyone done testing, intentional or otherwise?

[NecroRebel]

I once caved in a plug about 80 tiles around and 20 thick. My game hung for around 45 minutes, with Windows believing that it had frozen/stopped responding for that whole time.

It's generally believed that calculating where everything has to go takes a lot of processing power. It's probably not very efficient; something like "wall in tile X is unsupported, remove wall from tile X, make wall in tile X-1... Wall in tile X-1 is unsupported, remove wall from tile X-1, make wall in tile X-2..." repeated until everything is where it needs to be. In short, it calculates where everything needs to fall to one tile at a time instead of all at once, which means it has to take dozens of times the cycles for large masses or drops. Then, all the tiles that now need to produce a dust plume need to be calculated, which is yet more for the processor to do. In short, cave-ins require a large amount of processing power, even for very small cave-ins.

[Lectorog]

I think I read (and saw) that cave-ins don't actually occur tile-by-tile; rather, everything teleports down to the last tile, destroying anything applicable in between.

My mini-fort wasn't that big at the time, but still had a few hundred stone blocks constructed. The merchants in the depot wouldn't help either.

Would my having dropped it into the depths of the volcano make any impact on this? I gave the game about 10 minutes to try and load, but then decided I had better things to do; I may have to try and replicate this.

[NecroRebel]

I think I read (and saw) that cave-ins don't actually occur tile-by-tile; rather, everything teleports down to the last tile, destroying anything applicable in between.

It might do that, but that doesn't mean that the game calculates it like that.

My mini-fort wasn't that big at the time, but still had a few hundred stone blocks constructed. The merchants in the depot wouldn't help either.

Would my having dropped it into the depths of the volcano make any impact on this? I gave the game about 10 minutes to try and load, but then decided I had better things to do; I may have to try and replicate this.

Dropping stuff into the semi-molten rock probably does change things, as that stuff eats whatever falls into it. It might cause more or less lag; hard to say.

Anyway, it's not like leaving your fort to calculate a cave-in is dangerous or anything. As soon as the game is finished processing the disaster, you'll get the "A section of the cavern has collapsed!" message, which will pause the game for you. If you want to see the aftermath, just leave it and come back occasionally to check the game's status.

[Lost Requiem]

In the older builds of Dwarf Fortress (before the 2010 release), I was doing this project to flatten out a glacial volcano. I did this by cutting through a mountain, then collapsing the layer by turning off the support holding it up (think that episode in Spongebob when Doodlebob erases one Z-layer of Spongebob's house). It worked until it crashed the program on the 6th attempt. I like how channeling works in the new build. It makes leveling terrain much more convenient.

[krenshala]

In the older builds of Dwarf Fortress (before the 2010 release), I was doing this project to flatten out a glacial volcano. I did this by cutting through a mountain, then collapsing the layer by turning off the support holding it up (think that episode in Spongebob when Doodlebob erases one Z-layer of Spongebob's house). It worked until it crashed the program on the 6th attempt. I like how channeling works in the new build. It makes leveling terrain much more convenient.

I use upward ramps instead of channeling.  The idiot miners don't channel themselves into a cave-in that way (though they do occasionally cause others to "job canceled: cannot path to site" if the floor gets dug out from under them ).